A Skeptical Scrutiny of the Works and Theories of WILHELM REICH

As related to

Psychiatric Orgone Therapy (character-analytic
vegetotherapy)

By Roger M. Wilcox

Last modified 20-July-2005

"My objection to vegetotherapy is not that it deviates from the cautious,
interpretative techniques of classical analysis but that its underlying
theory seems to me to be bad biology. For instance, Reich's
description of the segmental arrangement of character armor and his
assertion that it 'represents the worm in man' (See Selected
Writings p. 158 et seq.) seems to me to run counter to evolutionary
theory and to comparative morphology."
— Charles Rycroft, psychoanalyst, in
The New York Review of Books, 12-Feb-1970

Orgone therapy was Reich's term for the therapeutic use of
character analysis combined with a
technique Reich called vegetotherapy. Reich's second wife, Elsa
Lindenburg, was trained in
Laban movement
analysis, and was a pupil of Elsa Gindler, who had started to develop a
system of breathing and somatic responsiveness named Arbeit am Menschen
in 1910. It's likely through his second wife's exposure to these notions
that Reich got the idea to get the body directly involved in therapy.
Reich first presented the principles of his vegetotherapy in a paper on
"Psychic contact and vegetative current" in August 1934 at the 13th
International Congress of Psychoanalysis at Lucerne, Switzerland, and went on
to develop the technique between 1935 and 1940. Vegetotherapy centers on
Reich's theory that childhood suppression of ones emotional expressiveness not
only stays with that person into adulthood, but is directly held in chronic
spasms of the musculature called "muscular armor." Vegetotherapy involves
having the patient breathe deeply, gag, roll his eyes, stick out his tongue,
hit and kick the "couch" with gusto, bite down on soft inanimate objects,
and/or having the therapist directly "attack" what (s)he perceives to be the
patient's tensed muscles with the fingers and hands in a manner reminiscent of
acupressure. Reich also claimed that contracting a "biopathic" illness in
response to the therapy was normal, and should be viewed as a sign that the
therapy was progressing.

Reich described vegetotherapy in some detail in the 1945 edition of
Character Analysis, and in the greatest detail in what also happened to
become his most well-known book in the English speaking world, The Function
of the Orgasm. He derived the term "vegetotherapy" from the
vegetative (autonomic) nervous system. Even he, though, realized there
would be problems using a name like "character analytic vegetotherapy":

"This term had many disadvantages which, at the time, I could not
help. For one, it was too long. Moreover, it contained the word
'vegetative,' which, while it is correct in German, is suggestive of
'vegetables' in English."
— Character Analysis, chapter XIV,
sec. 1

Thus, the moment Reich discovered orgone
energy, he began referring to character analytic vegetotherapy as
"psychiatric orgone therapy," or simply "orgone therapy." Despite its
name, orgone therapy had nothing to do with the therapeutic use of any of
Reich's orgone energy devices, such as the orgone
accumulator or the medical DOR buster.
Orgone therapy was accomplished entirely with the therapist's bare hands.

Vegetotherapy was built on the assumption of several distinct, and occasionally
self-contradictory, hypotheses:

Libido, electric currents, orgone, or some other kind of energy really did
move through the body.

Beneficial, "primal" emotions such as love and rage were the expression of
this moving energy.

Muscular contractions blocked that energy flow.

Chronic muscular contractions "held" energy within them that would
otherwise have been released.

The energy held in chronically contracted muscles got there because of
specific emotions that the organism had blocked. This resulted in a
character that expressed bad, "secondary" emotions such as frustration and
anxiety.

Specific secondary emotions tended to be caused by holding/blocks in
specific muscles; e.g. a stubborn character usually had chronic contractions in
the muscles of his lower back.

Mobilization of the chronically contracted muscles freed the energy held in
them, which was expressed as the original emotion that got blocked.

Memories associated with the original emotion were also stored in the
chronically contracted muscles, and released and re-experienced when the block
was freed.

Because the freed muscle group had been chronically contracted for so long, it
had gotten used to being that way, and would likely become contracted again
when any new emotions came along similar to the one that had been stored
there. The same muscle group might need to get worked on many, many times
before it could be cured.

It seems that with vegetotherapy, as with his natural scientific work, Reich
formed his theories out of whole cloth and then sought out only that evidence
which would back them up, but then later claimed that the reverse was actually
the case. In a monograph written in 1940, Reich claimed of vegetotherapy:

"This technique for the therapy of neurosis was experimentally based on the
discovery of the bioelectrical nature of sexuality and anxiety."
— W. Reich, Further Problems of Work
Democracy, Overview

However, Reich first proposed vegetotherapy in August 1934, before his
biolelectrical experiments had even begun,
and thus before any bioelectrical character to sexuality or anxiety could have
been experimentally established.

Reich divided the body into seven segments, one on top of the other: the ocular
(eye) segment, the oral segment, the cervical (neck) segment, the thoracic
(chest) segment, the diaphragmatic segment, the abdominal segment, and the
pelvic segment. The arms were considered part of the thoracic segment,
while the legs were considered part of the pelvic segment. Orgone energy
within the body was supposed to move upward, from the pelvic segment up through
one segment after another, until it reached the top of the ocular segment and
escaped out of the top of the head. A "block" (muscular armor) in any
segment would shut off the flow of orgone energy to the segments above
it. The therapist's job was to dissolve these blocks starting from the
topmost (ocular) segment and working his way down. Reich felt that if a
lower block were dissolved while a higher-up block were still in place, the
energy released by dissolving the lower block would rush up and slam into the
higher block, resulting in all sorts of nasty problems for the patient —
thus the need for the therapist to work his way down from the top.

Dissolving one block didn't always mean that a segment had been completely freed,
however. A person's armoring could be "layered" one block on top of
another, each one of which held a different emotion and was expressed as a
different character trait. Many psychologists and philosophers, Freud
included, have divided personal behavior into the persona and the
shadow. The persona is the social façade a person
presents in public; according to this theory, it is in fact a "false"
layer. The shadow is supposed to be a person's "real" emotions,
which aren't shown in public either because they are too socially unacceptable
or because the person would feel vulnerable if (s)he showed them. Reich
took this theory and went further, claiming that even the "shadow" was merely
a vast secondary layer, perhaps composed of several sublayers of blocks one
on top of the other, which in turn sat on top of an even deeper "primary" layer
of basic natural functioning. If all of these outer layers could be
removed, so Reich believed, the person revealed underneath would be so
wonderful that he wouldn't need a "persona" — he would behave like
a decent person spontaneously. He would also be a far more capable
individual, self regulating, orgastically
potent, and all sorts of other great and desirable things. With a
promise like that held out before the public eye — even if Reich himself
never tried to "sell" his therapy as any kind of a panacea — it is no
wonder that many people have been drawn to orgone therapy over the years,
regardless of the therapy's actual track record in eliciting improvement in its
patients.

Vegetotherapy, and the theory of muscular "holding" of the emotions that it is
partly based on, seems antithetical to the conventional model of emotions as
being "brain" phenomena. If emotions are the expression of energy moving
through various parts of the body, and can be physically stored in the
musculature, then the presence of emotions should not have any specific brain
activity associated with it — or at most should only be reflected
in brain activity (i.e. the brain activity should follow a tiny bit after
the onset of the emotion, and it should be impossible to cause any emotion
merely by artificially creating some specific brain activity). This is at
odds with the body of evidence we've accumulated in studying brain activity
since Reich's time. When aggressive emotions are experienced, the
hypothalamus shows increased activity — not just on occasion, but every
single time. The thalamus seems always to be involved in the experience
of the more complex, strong emotions, such as loneliness and longing. The
October 2000 issue of Nature Neuroscience contains a report studying
four emotions — sadness, happiness, anger, and fear — and showing a
consistent correlation between each emotion and activity in various specific
areas of the brain, including those brain areas responsible for homeostasis
(the regulation of body temperature, blood pressure, and other internal
activity). More importantly, it is possible to make someone experience
aggressive emotions by electrically stimulating the hypothalamus — a cat
that normally ignores mice can be made to attack and kill mice by sending a
small current down an electrode into the cat's hypothalamus. Evidence like this
shows more than a merely incidental correlation between emotions and brain
activity, it shows an outright cause-and-effect relationship.

Furthermore, it's pretty easy to demonstrate that thoughts can trigger
emotions, and that some of these emotions can cause short-term muscle tension
whether expressed or not. If I think about sex, I get horny; if I think
about food, I get hungry; if I think about that pompous know-nothing git at the
triple-A DMV counter who talked down to me while she was reading off my
registration record even though she had no clue how to read it properly and
tried to charge me an extra 23 dollars, I get angry. And when I get
angry, several muscle groups tense up. They tense up in
expectation of imminent conflict, making themselves ready to lash out at any
instant. Later, when the thoughts have passed — regardless of
whether I acted on these thoughts or "pushed them aside" — the muscle
tension is no longer there.

— Portion of article yet to be written. —

Several different techniques are used by the character-analytical
vegetotherapist to attempt to mobilize, or "free", the blocks in the
musculature in the order that they're supposed to be freed:

Deep breathing

Reich felt that there was a natural, "right" way to breathe, and that shallow
breathing or breathing with the chest or abdomen held rigid interfered with the
healthy movement of orgone energy within the body. Thus, it was important
to get the patient to breathe deeply and "naturally" so as to get his internal
energy moving.

Reich encouraged his patients to make noise when they exhaled, and to exhale
all the way; he sometimes assisted by pushing down on the abdomen near
the end of expiration. There was nothing peaceful, calming, or relaxing
about this deeper breathing. Reich's intent during character-analytic
vegetotherapy was precisely the opposite. He sought to get his patients
"worked up," to get them feeling the stronger, more aggressive emotions
normally kept under wraps beneath their "social façade." Such an
effort would doubtlessly liven up the muscle tissue around the body with extra
oxygen, and would probably have the effect of encouraging muscle groups here
and there to tense up more than they would otherwise — exactly the
effect Reich claimed was a sign of emotional blockage and
holding, not of enlivening!

An orgonomist would argue, though, that one purpose of enervating the patient
via deep breathing is specifically to bring this muscular tension out into
sharp relief. These regions of muscular tension are in fact where the
blocks are, they would argue, and the more energy that flows through the
patient's body, the more the blocked muscles will contract in order to "fight
it."

— Portion of article yet to be written. —

Gagging

When someone experiences extreme anxiety, it can cause him or her to
vomit. Reich may have assumed that vomiting — or more to the point,
the convulsive gag reflex that accompanies vomiting — acts to release the
pent-up anxiety. Thus, one of his therapeutic techniques was to have
a patient stick his own finger down his throat and gag.

There is a possibility that frequent gagging, even without vomiting, may
damage the esophagus. While it is well-known that bulimics, who often gag
to make themselves vomit, can get esophageal damage similar to that of
acid-reflux disease because of the stomach acid they regularly regurgitate,
what is not so well-known is that bulimics can also get tears in their
esophageal lining from the physical stress of vomiting alone.
Although I have not been able to find any research in the area of the long-term
effects of gagging without vomiting, the fact that the muscular
contractions of the gag reflex are part-and-parcel of the vomiting process
may mean that gagging by itself might be physically stressful enough
to cause esopahgeal tears too. Tears in the lining of the esophagus can
become a life-threatening condition if they bleed profusely or cause the
esophagus to rupture.

— Portion of article yet to be written. —

Rolling the eyes

The ocular segment was not only the topmost segment of the body; the eyes, in
Reich's view, were erogenous organs, in the same way that the mouth, anus, and
genitalia were erogenous organs. And since in Reich's view all muscular
armoring was ultimately a defense against the patient's natural sexuality, the
eyes would be particularly prone to developing muscular armor. If Reich
sensed a blocking in the eyes, he would tell his patient to roll his eyes
around, looking to the farthest corners of their range of motion, as a kind
of eyeball calisthenics. Reich also insisted that his patients not
merely "point" their eyes off at extreme angles, but that they also really
"looked" at what was there (usually the corners of the therapy room's ceiling)
and "made contact" with what they were seeing.

Many modern orgonomists also use a penlight to elicit eye movement in their
patients. They position the light near the patient's face, shine it
toward the patient's eyes, and move the light around while it's close enough to
the patient's face that the patient has to move his eyes to or near the
farthest reaches of their tracking range. The patient is not to "cheat"
and move his head toward the light while this is going on. There is
little or no agreement among orgonomists as to how long this should go on
for. Dr. Elsworth Baker, a colleague of Reich's and founder of the
American College of Orgonomy in 1967, wrote a book describing
character-analytic vegetotherapy called Man in the Trap. In
chapter 4 (p. 50, 1980 softcover ed.), he quotes Dr. Barbara Goldenberg, who
says that she could dig up a strong release of unconscious material in her
patients if she had them follow the light for 15 minutes or more. (This
may be because the patient had gotten bored, or even entered a state of
hypnosis, after following a light pen back-and-forth for such a long
time.) Another orgonomist, who edited one of the editions of Man in
the Trap, insisted in a footnote that such long periods of following the
light were terribly bad for the patient, and that it should never go on for
more than 5-10 minutes.

— Portion of article yet to be written. —

Sticking out the tongue

Sticking the tongue way out as the patient exhaled was one of Reich's ways to
work on the muscles in the oral segment. This action also pulls slightly
on the top of the throat, and so would have a mild effect on the cervical
segment as well.

— Portion of article yet to be written. —

Hitting and kicking, biting, etc.

Reich encouraged his patients to hit and kick the "couch," bite on soft
objects, and otherwise lash out at tough, inanimate objects when they felt
anger — and sometimes when they didn't feel anger but seemed relatively
"immobile." This "punching bag" approach is hardly unique to orgone
therapy. If nothing else, it makes for good exercise.

Reich usually encouraged his patients to yell and scream while they were
lashing out. This was supposed to help free all that pent-up rage they'd
been holding in their cervical segments. One thing this certainly does is
reinforce the feelings of rage brought about by the hitting and kicking.
Thus, the therapist can feels justified that he's "brought out" a patient's
suppressed rage, because by yelling the patient is encouraged to go at it with
that much more gusto.

There may also be something to the notion that physical activity (including
hitting and kicking) may encourage the expression of more aggressive
emotions. I sometimes experience more thoughts centered on confrontation
when I've been under a small degree of stress or frustration and then go
jogging. Perhaps hitting, kicking, biting, and screaming, because they
involve physical activity, work in a similar fashion. Several
possibilities exist for why this should be so, and most of them do not require
any of the theories behind vegetotherapy to be true.

Among psychiatrists, the expression of violent emotions in order to "vent" or
"purge" them is called catharsis. Many people who have gone
through catharsis-based therapies, such as vegetotherapy or primal-scream
therapy (whether genuine Arthur Janov brand Primal Therapy or otherwise),
report a tremendous sense of satisfaction and well-being at having been given
an arena to vent these strong, socially-taboo emotions. The problem is,
this improvement doesn't last very long. The next week, they're usually
right back where they started, ready for another dose of their violence-venting
"medicine." When engaged in therapy of this sort, one must evaluate, as
objectively as possible, whether there is any real long-term improvement or if
instead the rage-venting sessions are little more that a drug providing an
ephemeral high. And whether the same high can't be had by hitting and
kicking and yelling on ones own bed at home, or sprinting around the block a
few times at full tilt without anger being involved.

The catharsis hypothesis that underlies catharsis therapy holds that
acting aggressively is an effective way to reduce anger and aggressive
feelings. Psychological research into whether the catharsis hypothesis
actually has any merit is woefully sparse. One relatively recent study
(Bushman et al.,
1999) claimed to find that catharsis can actually make people more
prone to violent and antagonistic behavior, not less — however, this
study was performed by a group with an axe to grind against violence in the
popular media, so its conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt.

Attacking the muscular armor

If chronics spasms of the musculature are responsible for "holding back"
emotional expression, an obvious therapeutic technique would seem to be to
press on the tensed muscles hard enough to force them to "let go." Reich
found that if he pressed hard enough on the tensed muscles with his fingertips,
his patients would react with anger or anxiety — sometimes quite
violently — and in many cases the muscles did indeed seem to relax.
More importantly, according to Reich, in many instances the patient being
worked on would re-experience emotions from other, earlier epochs in his/her
life. Reich took this as a sign that the emotions themselves were held
in the tensed musculature.

This technique, carried forward into modern times by practitioners from the
American College of Orgonomy and other
places, resembles a cross between acupressure, the techniques of the Kyoto
School of Pain Control (founded in the 1940s), and the more-recent technique
of Rolfing. It is quite
painful, often excruciatingly so. Orson Bean, who described being
subjected to this technique in his book
Me and
the Orgone, said it brought to mind Franchot Tone in the torture scene
frrm "Lives of Bengal Lancer."

And it is no wonder. Applying hard pressure to many areas of the body,
whether tensed or not, can be very painful. Nor is it surprising that
an orgone therapist, such as Reich, should get a strongly emotional reaction
out of his patients when he applies a painful pressure. As Lucy van
Pelt once observed in the Peanuts comic strip, "Pain hurts!"

When a muscle group is poked at, it's a natural, instinctive reaction to
contract that muscle group, to prevent whatever is poking you from damaging the
organs underneath. Orgone therapists conflate this notion of a physical
defense mechanism with emotional or psychological defenses.
Much ado is made among orgone therapists about how, after a muscle group is
attacked and "its" emotions are released, the muscle group is softer and less
rigid and does not hurt nearly as much if attacked again. This is seen as
evidence that the attack worked. The thing is, relaxation of a muscle
group can also be accomplished with a gentle deep-tissue massage that does not
involve intense pain or the release of strong emotions. A relaxed muscle,
by putting up less resistance to the poking and digging-in of an orgone
therapist's attack, will also experience less pain, no matter how that
relaxation was accomplished. And of course, even if the muscle group
doesn't relax, it will still feel less pain over time due to the release of
endorphins.

But what of Reich's claim that old emotions and memories are revived because
they were stored in a particular muscle and the therapist's attack released
them? Reich wrote:

"The patients in whom one succeeds in getting directly at the vegetative
sexual energy bound in the musculature produce the affect before they know
what affect they are dealing with. Furthermore, the memory of the
experience which originally produced the affect automatically emerges
without any effort. . . . This fact cannot be
over-emphasized; it is as important as it is typical. It is not that
under certain circumstances a memory brings about an affect, but that
the concentration of a vegetative excitation and its breakthrough
reproduces the remembrance."
— The Function of the Orgasm, ch.
VIII, sec. 3 (p. 315, 1973 trans.) [emphasis in original]

The concept of memories lying dormant is a common theme in many metaphysical
systems and "alternative" cures.
Homeopathy, so say its proponents, works because water molecules "remember"
whatever substance they last came into contact with.
Repressed memory therapy hinges
on the notion that memories of traumatic events, such as childhood sexual
abuse, are often sublimated because they are "too painful" to remember but may
be later brought to the surface by sufficient encouragement. Some
hypnotists go so far as to
claim that humans have total recall and that hypnosis can bring otherwise
"hidden" memories to the forefront. Paul Pearsall believes that each cell
of the body has a cellular
memory that can explain why organ-transplant recipients might suddenly
acquire a craving for foods that the organ donor liked (perhaps these memories
are stored in the
midi-chlorians).
Reich's theory of muscular-armor emotional memory seems to fit in well
alongside these others.

A little bit of the appearance of emotional memories stored in the
musculature may be caused by the therapist leading the patient; the therapist
expects to see old, unresolved emotions brought to the fore by his efforts, and
so he asks the patient "What are you reminded of?," which encourages the
patient to dredge up old experiences. And some of this may be because the
musculature really is involved in some of the trials and tribulations of
growing up; a child who endures harsh toilet training may have to "hold it in"
by keeping his bowels constantly constricted, and this may indeed carry forward
into adolescence and adulthood, for example.

But the bulk of this apparent emotional-release reaction does not require any
notion of "emotions stored in the muscles" to understand. When going
through an unpleasant experience, it's not uncommon to remember similar
unpleasant experiences from ones past for comparison. The muscular pain
the orgone therapist inflicts probably acts as nothing more than a reminder of
similar pain felt in the past. And the more emotionally traumatic the
circimstances were surrounding the pain, the more strongly they will be
remembered.

The attacks on the muscular armor are probably the most controversial aspect
of orgone therapy. And since Reich's time, orgone therapy has not been
the only therapy to use hard, direct pressure on the musculature to allegedly
achieve therapeutic ends.

A webpage maintained by a modern practitioner of "Muscle Effect Therapy,"
titled Body Armour - Wilhelm
Reich, makes the following claim:

"Reich's use of forceful touch to break down body armour and with this,
emotional blocks to healing, is very similar to a therapy called
Bindegewebearbeit (translation: connective tissue work) developed by a
Czechoslovakian doctor around the same timespan, 1930ish, in
Bratislava. This town is on the border between Austria and
Czechoslovakia, and barely 50 miles away from Vienna. Given the
proximity, and the fact that Vienna at that time was a major centre for
medical and psychological research, it is more than likely that the two
men met and exchanged ideas. In fact, looking at the similarity
between their theories and working methods, I feel that it is probable
that one of them used the other's ideas in his own practice. This
could have been either way, or indeed there could have been a level of
joint though later unattributed developmental work."

Unfortunately, the author does not know the name of this Czech doctor.
The author does claim that the Czeck doctor founded a school in Germany,
and one of his pupils was Dr. Ida Rolf, the inventor of
Rolfing. However, none of
the Ida Rolf biography webpages I've searched for makes any mention of Ida Rolf
ever having studied in Germany.

— Portion of article yet to be written. —

Biopathic reactions

"Biopathy" is Reich's term for degenerative diseases caused by a chronic
malfunction in the organism's energy. He considered cancer to be a
biopathic illness in most cases, which is why I address the subject of
biopathies more thoroughly in my cancer biopathy
critique. Reich was quick to label any degnerative disease as a biopathy
when he was unable to diagnose a conventional (infectious) cause.

One of Reich's claims about character-analytic vegetotherapy was that the
patient's chronic armor would react against the therapist's attempts to
dissolve it — so much so that the patient's energy flow could become even
worse than before (s)he started therapy, and thus the patient could contract a
biopathic illness for a short time. He came to this conclusion as the
result of seeing many patients get sick during the course of their
therapy. Sometimes this sickness would even seem "connected" to what
Reich diagnosed as the patient's character armor, i.e. a patient with a
chronically-contracted abdomen might get cancer in his abdominal region, or a
patient with a "blocked" optic segment might develop schizophrenia (Reich
believed that lack of eye contact was central to schizophrenia).

The thing is, Reich's therapy could take years for a patient to
complete. It's to be expected that at least some of his patients
would contract a serious illness during that time. Reich never kept count
of how many of his patients developed "biopathic" illnesses, or how many of
these illnesses were "related" to a previous diagnosis of character armor, or
how severe these illnesses were. He only kept good records in cases that
caught his attention. Like many other of Reich's endeavors, he had a
tendency to count the hits and ignore the misses.

The proof is in the pudding

Reich's hypotheses aside, the only way to judge the efficacy of any therapy is
to apply objective standards for patients' emotional health and improvement,
and compare them to a control group that received either no therapy or a
different therapy. Such studies are very hard to come by, even for
well-established therapies like psychoanalysis. To my knowledge, no
clinically-controlled study of the effectiveness of character-analytic
vegetotherapy has ever been attempted.

However, studies of the "cure rate" among neurotics who received no
therapy have been made. One of the earliest appeared in a 1946
issue of the New York State Journal of Medicine. R. Denker
followed 500 cases whose neuoses were severe enough that they were receiving
disability payments from their life insurance companies. He found that
after one year of receiving no treatment at all, 45% of the cases recovered
from their neuroses. After two treatment-free years, a total of 72% had
recovered; after three years, 82%; after four years, 87%; and finally, after
the full five year run of the study was completed, a grand total of 90% of the
formerly-severe-neurotics had recovered. Later studies questioned
Denker's criteria for recovery and the possibility that his sample was biased;
a 1976 report by Bergin (cited in Dennis H. Karpowitz's
The Effectiveness of Psychotherapy), for example, reports only a 0-46%
overall rate of recovery from neuroses among the members of the various
no-treatment control groups it cites. Nevertheless, one thing is certain:
at least some neuroses go away without therapy.

Ultimately, we simply don't know whether, and to what degree,
character-analytic vegetotherapy is effective or not. Organizations like
the American College of Orgonomy, who
claim the the therapy is the Way and the Truth and the Light, simply lack any
studies to back up claims of the therapy's effectiveness, and — with
their insistence that nebulous, subjective criteria like
orgastic potency are the only way to
determine "true" emotional health — they lack even the ability to make
such an objective test of the therapy's efficacy to begin with.